FROM NAMTIR RAIDERS, TO A BIT OF BOVVER WITH BEARS THEN ON TO BATMAN...
AND BEYOND

As was so often the case, it all began with a ZX81. JON
RITMAN was working as a TV engineer with Radio Rentals when they decided to do
some market trails on renting out Ataris. Thinking there would be a need for
specialist engineers if home micros caught on, Jon bought himself a ZX81 in January
1982 to find out for himself what these computers were all about.

The bearded Jon Ritman takes a half-time
break from being interviewed and joins MATCH DAY co-creator Chris Clarke for
a bit of fresh air. The duo are “Over the Moon, John” at the prospect of
transferring their programming skills to a new football simulation for the
Spectrum, and expect to be signing with High Street stores in time for
Christmas

The bug caught Jon very quickly — he spent a week staying up
till two in the morning, motoring through the manual that came with the ZX81,
then scampered out and bought a RAMpack and a book on machine code.

Within six months, Jon’s first game was complete and Namtir Raiders
(Ritman backwards, geddit?) was launched by Artic. Then the Spectrum came along
and Mr Ritman, flushed with the success of his first attempt at serious games
programming, wrote a Spectrum game — ARG. It was never released, but his
second Spectrum game, Cosmic Debris made it into the shops on the Artic
label before CRASH appeared in newsagents. Three more Ritman games were
published by Artic during 1983 — 3D Combat Zone, Dimension Destructors
and Bear Bovver. Bear Bovver established Jon as a class Spectrum
programmer, scoring 90% Overall in the days before Smashes (issue 3), it was a
highly addictive platforms and ladders game with state-of-the-art animation and
excellent graphics. Mr Ritman was soon to referred to as “Ace Programmer” on
the pages of computer magazines....

In 1983 Chris Clarke, one of the founder members of Crystal Computing which
evolved into the present day Design Design, moved to Artic, working on the
business side of games software, rather than as a programmer. Chris and Jon and
were involved in the marketing of Bear Bovver and they got chatting
about the sort of games that should be written on the Spectrum. They reckoned a
good football game was called for.

The duo looked at the Commodore 64 game, International Soccer, and
talked to distributors who backed up their theory that what the Spectrum needed
was a decent footie game. Chris had been programming on a ZX81, and after a
bit of thought he and Jon decided to go it alone, leave Artic and write that
Spectrum football game.

One week after they started serious work, Artic released World Cup
Football. Disaster loomed up large ... or did it? “We weren’t too worried,
once we had seen it”, Jon confesses.

Jon and Chris beavered away at Match Day, confident that they could
write a highly playable football game. When it arrived, before Christmas two
years ago, the CRASH reviewers were well impressed but didn’t quite give the
game a Smash. A mistake. A mistake that we all now admit in CRASH Towers —
more than eighteen months after it was first released, Match Day still makes
regular appearances in the Hotline Chart and Lloyd still gets the odd nagging
letter, saying that we underrated it way back in Issue 13! A definite classic...

Jon’s basic approach to writing a game explains, in part, why Match Day is
still so popular. “I don’t like games with difficult controls — it’s like
having an adventure that doesn’t understand words. I like producing a good
game, and I’m a perfectionist. One of my specialities is playing games, I
suppose, and I get annoyed if there are too many controls to a game or if it’s
not fun to play. I get really aggravated, so when it comes to writing a game I
take a lot of care in getting the feel right.”

Jon starts a new programming project by planning the gameplay — some
programmers are programmers first of all, and tend to write for their own
technical satisfaction: they’re keen on programming and gameplay often
comes second. Simon Bratell, of Design Design works that way round, and finds
a game to go with a technically excellent programming feat.

“I build the gameplay first and then fit a story around it in the last week.
People who just write a game to a scenario have got it all wrong in my opinion...
we ended up spending nearly all the time getting the gameplay right on
Match Day.”

Match Day was very successful, which took some of the financial
pressures from the Ritman budget and Jon found he could afford to work at a
more leisurely pace. “I saw Knight Lore soon after I’d finished work on
Match Day and decided ‘this is the sort of world I like to see a game
in — it’s just like playing a Disney cartoon’. The germ of an idea that became
Batman nearly eighteen months later had been sown... Serious work on
the new game began around Easter last year.

Jon worked with a friend of his, Bernie Drummond on the Batman
project — “Bernie used to draw just for fun,” Jon explained, and I asked him if
he would be interested in doing some graphics for me. He agreed, and I let him
have a copy of my drawing utility for the Spectrum. A couple of days later he
came up with the first Batman graphics.

“Bernie works in an unusual way — he just sort of scribbles randomly on the
screen and then looks to see what’s there. It’s a bit like the Rorschach test,
where people are shown ink blots and asked if they can see pictures in them.
Bernie might spot something that looks like, say, an eyebrow and start
building up a character. Two hours later he’s got a finished graphic! He’s
a perfectionist too, though, and can easily spend a day changing a couple of
pixels.”

Batman took an awful long time to write. “I tend to work in intense
spurts,” Jon admitted, “I don’t like to put a problem down until it is solved.
And I did have three months off between August and October last year — I just
wanted a rest... There was a one month delay over the licence as well —
Batman is not a superhero — he’s got no superpowers — he’s a
detective. The people who own the rights are very careful about what they let
people do and everything had to go to the States first for approval.”

Batman wasn’t a stunningly original game in terms of concept, but it
fared very well at the hands of reviewers — the game has appeared on the
Spectrum, Amstrad, Amstrad PCW and on the Einstein. “It’s difficult to create
something different. There are only six or so basic types of game, and three of
them are down to Ultimate — I have got a lot of respect for them. As games
designers, Chris and I are always looking for new directions in terms of
gameplay but it is difficult to move off in a new direction. I’m not an
innovator — I take a synthesis of good points. With Batman, take a room
for instance: everything you need to solve it is in the room. I try to design a
game for everyone, for the games buying public. I get a lot of satisfaction
from writing a game and pleasing people — although the money’s nice!”, Jon
adds.

“A lot of people spend six or eight months on a game and then two or three
days at the end, putting the rooms together. The end result may be technically
good, but the gameplay is often bad — people seem to get fed up with a project
and want to get it out of the door. I can never really tell how long it will
take to complete an original game. In the last week of the project I get some
friends along to play the game and then alter it — in the case of
Batman, I swapped a lot of rooms around when my girlfriend had played
it.

A classic 3D game: BATMAN. Jon Ritman writes
his Z80 code in a modular fashion on his development system, with the screen,
keyboard and sound routines as separate modules that interact with the core
code. Although he writes for the Spectrum, when it comes to converting
to other Z80 based machines like the Amstrad or Einstein, it’s a matter of
weeks rather than months to get the conversion running

“It’s difficult to remember that not all players are experienced game
players, and not everyone has seen Knight Lore in the case of Batman for
instance. I need to watch someone who’s never played that sort of game before
— the most simple problems take some people ages to work out.”

What of the future? Nowadays, the team or project approach with lots of
people co-operating on a single game seems to be popular with some companies.
Could Mr Ritman find himself in a staff job as part of a team, rather than a
freelance working at home in front of his Micro Mini development system?
“No. The trouble with the team approach is that the game designer doesn’t know
the limitations of the programming. I enjoy being a jack of all trades,
playing the intellectual/technical role if you like, as well as the creative
side. I look at the market and then add technical expertise.”

No doubt Match Day fans have already spotted the Match Day
challenge laid down by Chris and Jon — we should be inviting a few selected
few high-scoring readers to Ludlow for a play off against the programmers in
the next few weeks. Jon and Chris still play Match Day themselves, but
against humans rather than against the computer: “I can still play Match
Day against a human; it’s no fun playing Batman or Match Day
against the machine any more. In the next football game I hope to have the
machine intelligence at a level where I won’t be able to beat it...”

Next football game? Yes it’s true! The men who brought you Match Day
are currently working on a football simulation which has the working title
Three and In because the gameplay follows the rules of Three and In!
Bernie Drummond has been roped in to help on the graphics and Chris and Jon
hope to have the game ready in time for this Christmas. There will be two
players to each side, and the animations are going to be large. At the start,
the first task is to pick your team — the computerised footballers each have
their own playing and passing skills, and the choice of players will influence
the outcome of a game. One, two or three people will be able to play. It’s
early days in the development at the moment — but Jon is keen to get as much
realistic detail into the game as possible: the players will run around looking
behind them, for instance.

“I wanted to incorporate machine intelligence into Three and In”, Jon
explained, “but I was a bit scared to begin with. Then I sorted out a few
lines of code which basically instructed the computer player to run for the
ball and then kick it. Thirty seconds after the little program had been
loaded, it scored a goal against me. I laughed for fifteen minutes...”

Foot and Mouth is the other game currently under production at chateau
Ritman. The game stars the two halves of a symbiotic creature — Foot, and
Mouth — and they look like a human being split at the waist when they are
together. F and M have been split apart by an evil being, and the ultimate
aim is for them to reunite. Each half of the composite creature has special
abilities and there will be two control methods in the game, one for Foot and
one for Mouth.

The game is going to use the same 3D viewpoint as Batman, and will be
room-based, only this time Jon is aiming for at least three hundred rooms.
Three kinds of puzzle are planned for F&M — one kind of puzzle that
Foot can solve, one that Mouth can overcome and a third that can only be solved
by Foot and Mouth together, once they have been reunited as a composite
being.

Two games from ‘Ace Programmer’ Jon Ritman in time for Christmas! Now
there’s a treat for Match Day and Batman fans...